Are the graduates of Michigan’s public schools equipped
with the know-how to perform well in workplace? There are grounds for serious
doubt, whether you listen to businessmen or scholars.

For example, Lee Lynam, vice president for labor
relations at Meijer headquarters in Grand Rapids, says employees just out of
high school often lack the ability to think through a task or solve a problem
on their own. "They have to be told what to do," she says, adding that the
typical high school graduate as an entry-level employee "has a large problem
understanding what business is all about. They don’t engage with the customer.
They lack the ability to process information."

At Kmart in Detroit, Karen Fauls, assistant human
resources manager, says that the company looks for and tests entry-level
employees, often fresh from school, for "common sense and reliability." This
includes the "ability to adapt to new situations and work efficiently with others,
and solve problems, which many don’t seem to have."

Jeff Patulski, president of Amptec, a Free Soil-based firm that makes electronic circuit board assemblies, echoes Fauls’s and Lynam’s sentiments: "We have to spend weeks training new employees
who just don’t have the skills or ability to follow instructions."

The "skills" that these employers described are keys to
workplace success — and are, in fact, basic components of intelligence.

Consider a recent article in the Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, a scholarly periodical published by the American
Psychological Association. In the course of assessing the
impact of IQ on personal health,[1]
author Linda S. Gottfredson quotes a description of
intelligence endorsed by 52 experts in the field: "Intelligence … involves the
ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex
ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning,
a narrow academic skill, or test-taking ‘smarts.’ Rather it reflects a broader
and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings — ‘catching on,’
‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do."

Gottfredson notes that intelligence "affects job
performance primarily indirectly by promoting faster and more effective learning
of essential job knowledge during both training and experience on the job." She
adds, however, "Higher levels of [intelligence] in the workplace also enhance
job performance directly when jobs require workers to solve novel problems,
plan, make decisions, and the like," with "increasingly large direct effects
when jobs are less routinized or less closely supervised. …"

No doubt individuals possess varying levels of innate
intelligence, but schools are supposed to cultivate it, not leave the task to
employers. Businesses’ and universities’ complaints on this score are
longstanding, and Michigan's efforts to redress the problem have not borne
fruit.

A classic example is the
Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests, which children take at
different grade levels as they progress through school. The test measures
knowledge of content standards developed by state educators, and the
state-sponsored exam is meant to encourage all Michigan public schools to make
sure students develop basic knowledge and skills.

But as Williamston School Superintendent Joel
Raddatz notes, the MEAP "lacks the ability to test conceptional thinking and
literacy that could be attained if students were, say, given several questions
and had to elaborate on answering them in a blue book."

Why the effectiveness of MEAP is flawed was pointed out by
Hillsdale College Professor Gary Wolfram in an
op-ed for the Spring 2000
Michigan Education Report. Wolfram, a former
member of the Michigan Board of Education, explained that the public school
system "is actually a political system that itself determines what is taught,
how it is taught, and how well it is taught, without much reference to the needs
and desires of the parent and kids who use the system." This, observed Wolfram,
is merely one of "several reasons why the MEAP is of questionable effectiveness
when it comes to weighing how successfully school districts are meeting the
needs of students."

Thus, MEAP exams do not provide effective avenues
for entrepreneurs or parents to determine what the children learn. Nor do they
necessarily measure intellectual characteristics most sought by employers.

As a consequence, schools can find it easy to graduate
students with substandard learning and skills. Gottfredson, for instance, notes that "educational level [such as a 12th grade
education] is a fallible guide to any particular individual’s literacy level
because education through high school represents only years of exposure to
learning, not actual accomplishment." Remedial instruction is
required by between 30 percent and 90 percent of all U.S. community college
students,
according to the Center for Community College Policy.

Big changes in Michigan's school systems are a must if the typical public school
graduate is going to be anywhere near prepared for the needs of the workforce —
especially a workforce called upon to meet the increasingly specialized and demanding jobs of the 21st Century.

#####

Tait Trussell is an award-winning writer who collaborates on occasional projects with the
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute
headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is
hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly cited.

[1]
"Intelligence: Is It the Epidemiologists' Elusive 'Fundamental Cause' of
Social Class Inequalities in Health?" by Linda S. Gottfredson, January 2004 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 86, No. 1).